Hazaras (Afghanistan and Pakistan)

Debate between Andrew Smith and John Denham

Monday 1st September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the position of Hazaras in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I am grateful for this debate, and I speak as an MP and as chair of the Hazara all-party parliamentary group. In recent weeks, we have seen ethnic and religious minorities face appalling violence at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Iraq and Syria. This debate is about another community that has suffered at the hands of very similar ideologues for far too long.

I knew little of the Hazara until I met constituents who were part of the Hazara diaspora and who had been forced to flee violence. I believe that might be true of other right hon. and hon. Members who want to speak in this debate. The Hazara are an indigenous people of Afghanistan, predominantly but not exclusively Shi’a Muslims. The community in Quetta in Pakistan’s Balochistan province was established in the late 19th century by Hazaras fleeing religious persecution in Afghanistan. It largely prospered, providing education for men and women and showing a deep-seated and industrious work ethic, until it became the target of terrorist attacks from about 1999.

Hazaras comprise between 10% and 20% of the population of Afghanistan. Persecution continued into the Taliban era, with thousands killed in massacres during the civil war and under the Taliban Government. In part, the Hazara are victims of the violence against Shi’a Muslims and other religious minorities that is endemic in Pakistan and has featured strongly in the history of Afghanistan. I do not want to underplay the common features shared with the wider violence against the Shi’a community, but Hazaras have suffered disproportionately, in part because their distinct ethnic identity makes them easily identifiable and targets for prejudice and discrimination.

There is little doubt that sectarian groups have received finance from states and individuals in the Gulf. Today, they might be recognising just what they have created in Iraq and Syria, but we and other western countries have been silent for far too long on their role. Just occasionally, the violence in Quetta makes the international news: in June 2012, when a university bus was bombed, killing four and injuring 72; and in early 2013, when two bombings killed 180 Hazaras. Continuing violence has been well documented in the recent Human Rights Watch report “We are the Walking Dead”, published in June 2014.

The community in Quetta comprises about 500,000 people, yet nearly 1,500 people have been killed since 1999 and more than 3,500 injured. The attacks have targeted breadwinners and forced businesses to close, promoting economic deprivation, while some recent attacks have directly targeted women and children. Perhaps 55,000 people have fled to Australia or Europe—of course, not all survived the journey—and following attacks on transport, students no longer attend university. In Quetta, the community is restricted to two enclaves with a total area of just 4 square miles. The community is isolated, with travel restrictions imposed by the Pakistani Government.

Shockingly, in the past 16 years, not one person has been brought successfully to justice. The al-Qaeda-affiliated organisation Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has openly claimed responsibility for the killings, while leading members have been seen associating with public figures and politicians in Pakistan. A few people have been arrested, but have then been released or able to escape or cases have been dismissed. It is clear that the Pakistan authorities have failed to act with any effectiveness to protect the Hazara community, with attacks taking place close to the presence of security forces.

[Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend and the others who have secured this debate, and I agree with everything in his very powerful speech. Does he agree that given the inability or unwillingness to bring people to justice for these horrors in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and given the hideous murders that have taken place, it is high time that the United Nations referred Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and other groups alleged to be responsible to the International Criminal Court in order to send the most powerful signal possible that this is utterly unacceptable to the international community?

[Mr Denham]

I think there is indeed a strong case for that, and I will come in a moment to the responsibility of the international community.

In other parts of Pakistan, the Pakistan state has made significant efforts against, for example, the Pakistan Taliban, that have not been made in Quetta. The Pakistan Government are clearly in breach of their international obligation to protect their people. We should call tonight for effective action by the Pakistan state, but those demands must be consistently reinforced by the international community, by individual Governments, including our own, and by international institutions, including the United Nations and its agencies, and that must be done in every relationship—political, military, development and human rights.

Demands for change must be central to our relationship with Pakistan, not just raised occasionally or at a junior level. Last year, the then Foreign Office Minister Baroness Warsi did raise those issues with Prime Minister Sharif and he denounced sectarian killings. What we now need to see is visible action to investigate those killings and prosecute those, particularly the LEJ leadership, who have claimed responsibility. Militant groups should be disbanded and those such as the political wing of the LEJ, which in March this year celebrated killings and pledged to eliminate Hazaras from Balochistan, must be brought under control.

We need the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development to recognise the roots of the problems faced by the Hazaras. I would like to see DFID develop assistance programmes to address the immediate needs of the community in Quetta. I would also like to see the conflict pool—the UK fund for conflict prevention, which already operates in other parts of Pakistan—extended to Balochistan. Big efforts must be made to engage the UN system, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith) said. The UN system has strong policies on human rights, preventing genocide and the protection of indigenous peoples, all of which should apply to the Hazara. While some recent and welcome progress has been made, much more could be done.

British Values: Teaching

Debate between Andrew Smith and John Denham

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Denham]

I will come precisely to that point in due course. I hope that hon. Members in the Chamber will bear with me. I have been through the history, because it is important to understand that we have debated some of these things before. If we do not understand what went wrong in the past, we will not get it right in future. The key point I am trying to make is that unless we support schools and teachers to do such work, none of the regulations or the speeches we make will make any difference to anybody. As Sir Keith Ajegbo’s review of diversity and citizenship reported, such work is not possible without support for teachers and the teaching methods that they need. He made this crucial point:

“In order for young people to explore how we live together in the UK today and to debate the values we share, it is important they consider issues that have shaped the development of UK society – and to understand them through the lens of history.”

[Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this important, timely and interesting debate. Following the earlier intervention, I put it to him—I do not say this tritely—that there is a problem in all this, because the right not to share some British values or some part of those values can, in itself, be argued to be a British value. The very act of trying to define this too narrowly can accentuate, rather than lessen, a sense of difference.

[Mr Denham]

How we handle difference is undoubtedly one of the British characteristics that students need to understand. I will talk about doing it in the right way and doing it in the wrong way in a moment.

Having said that teachers need support, the second point that I need to draw from history is that values mean little without an understanding of the history that has shaped them. Students need to be able to debate and explore values rather than simply being taught them. The Prime Minister spoke recently about Magna Carta. To get from Magna Carta to where we are today, we have to go through quite a period of burning bishops, cutting the heads off kings, fighting civil wars, invading other countries, being invaded and calling it a Glorious Revolution, trade union campaigns, women’s suffrage and all the rest of it. We can make no sense of our British values without understanding the history of how we came to be where we are.

Let me set out my concerns about what the Government are proposing. Hon. Members will have gathered that I agree with and support the idea of promoting British values. First, the Government have spent much of the past four years undoing the good work that was going on in schools. Secondly, they are expending far more energy on constructing a legal basis for intervening in schools than they are on helping teachers to promote British values. There are simpler ways of dealing with the sorts of problems we have seen in Birmingham. Thirdly, the legal definition of British values leaves too many contentious questions unresolved and carries too many risks. Fourthly, all attention has been focused deliberately on one community—the Muslim community—and not enough on addressing all those who will share in shaping Britain’s future. Fifthly, the Government have neglected the fact that we have multiple identities. I am English every bit as much as I am British. British values, as the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), has said, are seen through the prism of many other identities. Finally, there is too little practical support for schools, as I have said.

For four years, the Government have actively undermined good work in schools. Citizenship education has been weakened and Ofsted’s legal duty to inspect school promotion of community cohesion was ended in 2011. The Government promoted schools with greater autonomy to set their own curriculum and determine their own intake. The Government have funded free schools such as the Al-Madinah school in Derby, and they should not be surprised if their rhetoric encouraged the idea that schools could be narrowly tied to one part of the community or one set of parents. Faced with the consequences, the Government are now scrambling for new powers to intervene.

In current law and in the Government’s proposals, British values are set down as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs. No one will argue much with those. However, twice recently the Prime Minister has given different lists. He has spoken, for example, of accepting personal and social responsibility and of respect for British institutions, but in neither case did he say what he meant. Those are not in the Government’s proposals, and such sloppiness does not bode well for the future. British values cannot mean whatever the Prime Minister of the day, or a Secretary of State, means them to be. British values are crucial, but they are not unchanging. The Britain I was born into was commonly racist and deeply homophobic. Much has changed today.

None of the values listed explicitly challenges racism, sexism or homophobia. We have to dig into the draft regulations to read that British values are to be interpreted as meaning the Equality Act 2010. I wonder how many commentators, or indeed Government Members, realise that the Act is now the legal baseline for British values. I welcome the Act, but even I would hardly describe it as a timeless British value. What that tells us is the importance of students understanding where such statements of values come from and what they mean today. Students have to know the history, the arguments, the campaigns and the political disputes that have led to changing attitudes. It is better to see the Act as a snapshot of where our national debate had reached in 2010. Not everyone will support the Act’s values, which is the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith).

This Parliament has sanctioned gay marriage, despite the opposition of England’s established Church. Upholding the law means respecting gay marriage, but where does that leave the millions of people, of many faiths, who believe that gay marriage is wrong? To me, a key part of Britishness is the principled and practical compromises we reach to handle such differences. Those compromises are complex, subtle, ever-changing and democratic. Those of us who have met concerned constituents will agree that, in the best sense of the word, Britishness does not lend itself to law, but I will make this point: once the Government’s regulations are challenged, as they will be when they are used as the basis to intervene in schools, it will be the courts that define what British values mean. Instead of being dynamic and constantly evolving, judges will say what British values are. Given how many Government Members are exercised by what judges have done with the European convention on human rights, I am surprised that the Government want to give judges the power to decide what it is to be British.